EUSIPCO Student Travel Grants

EUSIPCO Student Travel Grants

EUSIPCO is the flagship conference of EURASIP. In order to promote participation of students, EURASIP offers each year several grants. The program is intended to enable students who lack funding opportunities to attend EUSIPCO.

Grant

Each grant consists of an amount of up to 750 euros to partially cover conference registration and travel expenses, including airfare (economy flights only), accommodation, subsistence, and other expenses incurred during the conference.

The stipends will be granted on reimbursement basis. Recipients have to provide to the EURASIP Director for Finances original invoices no later than one month after conclusion of the conference.

Eligibility

Active Ph.D students as well as M.Sci. students are eligible to apply for this grant. They must be a co-author of an accepted article at EUSIPCO. Students who are first author of an accepted manuscript in either a regular or a special session will be given preference. Recipients are required to present personally their manuscript at the conference. The grant will be awarded to students who need a financial support to attend the conference; the paper quality will also be taken into consideration in the selection process.

If other travel grants are being offered to students by other agencies (e.g. NFS), such grants will have to be advertised in a separate webpage. In that case, the EUSIPCO organizing committee will have to make sure that the Student Chair will also be part of the evaluation committee of the other student grants, in order to check for multiple applications, and to minimize the risk of having unassigned grants. Criteria will have to be devised on how to handle multiple applications, in a case-by-case fashion. For example, in the 2019 edition in A Coruña, in addition to the 10 EUSIPCO Student Grants, there were 10 additional Student Grants from NFS, of slightly higher monetary value, which were restricted to applicants from US-based academic institutions. In that situation, due to the scarcity of applications from US-based institutions, it was decided to transfer all eligible applications from EUSIPCO grants to NFS grants in order to be able to issue all the available NFS grants. This was done through a cross-analysis of all applications on the part of the Student Chair.

Recommended Procedure

The evaluation of the grant applications will be based on criteria that take into account the following aspects:

Applicants will have to be autors or co-authors of an accepted manuscript (no matter whether they present in a lecture session or in a poster session, or whether the presentation is in a regular or special session). If they co-authored more than one manuscript, they will have to choose which paper to apply with

Applicants that are first authors will be given precedence

Applicants from neighboring Countries will be given preference

Grant recipients will be required to present their manuscript at the conference in person

No more than one grant per team in an institution will be awarded

Cover letter and letter of presentation of the advisor will contribute to the evaluation

In order to implement the evaluation process we recommend using a shared spreadsheet. An example of template spreadsheet that incorporates these criteria is the one attached, which includes:

Quality of paper: the evaluation is a weighted average of the reviewer’s evaluation and that of the area chair, scaled to a maximum of 10

Authors order: if the applicant is the first author, grant 10 points, otherwise 0

Diversity of Country distribution: devise some criteria that tend to maximize the spread of Countries that are covered by the recipients. For example, add a small number of points (e.g. 2) if the Academic Institution of the applicant is in a EU Neighbor Country (see link above).

Process and timeline – The deadline for submitting applications is one month following the date of notification for acceptance. Usually the notification of acceptance is given in late May/early June, therefore the deadline will be approximately at the end of June. Before that deadline, the evaluation committee will meet (generally via teleconference) and discuss and refine the criteria to follow in the evaluation and how to implement them. Immediately after the deadline the EUSIPCO student chair will

go through the applications in order to

exclude those that do not satisfy eligibility criteria (missing documentation, not an author of an accepted paper);

transfer whatever grant applications need to be transfered to other evaluations concerning other agencies (see above)

initiate the collection of data and its organization in a spreadsheet (see the attached template example) that incorporates the criteria set forth in the initial meeting of the committee. In particular, the data will concern:

the evaluations of the reviewers and the area chairs

whether the applicant is or not the first author

whether the Country of application is a neighboring one

whether there are multiple applications from the same team (the best of such applications will be retained, the others discarded)

share the spreadsheet with the rest of the committee, along with the individual applications (organized in separate folders). This will be done by using any suitable cloud-based document sharing method (google docs, dropbox, …). The committee will be asked to fill out the missing information on the table, in particular the evaluation of the cover letter and the supervisor’s letter within a week.

organize a teleconferencing meeting with the committee in order to finalize the decision taking into account all criteria. This will consist of creating a list of winners and a list of at least four “next-in-line” winners (who might receive a travel grant if one or more of the winners gives it up or won’t show up at the Conference). This decision will have to be taken within two weeks from the application deadline (usually mid-July), in order to notify the students with sufficient notice;

Notify the applicants of the results of the evaluation and about the reimbursement procedure

After the selection procedure is finalized and a brief report is submitted to EURASIP, EURASIP will transfer 7500 Euro to the EUSIPCO organizer. This amount is to be used to make transfers to the grant recipients after the conference.

At the end of the process the Student Chair will make sure to report on the selection and reimbursement procedure in the final report of the Conference, and on the file collecting the related best practices.